Roll the Hard Six
by okaynextcrisis
Summary: A BSG/zombie apocalypse AU. Chapter 1: Doc Cottle has a very bad day.


**Chapter One**

* * *

Looking back, Sherman Cottle was glad of one thing: at least he'd had the sense to stock up on cigarettes before the end of the world.

He hadn't known it would be the end of the world of, course. No one had. But there had been signs, signs he could have been paying attention to, signs he _should_ have been paying attention to…

But he'd been so busy. They all had. Galactica Air Force Base had been designated "non-combat approved" by the top military brass, which, apart from being kind of insulting, had been a major headache, meeting- and memo- and paperwork-wise.

It was during this time that the second in command at the base, Colonel Saul Tigh, had taken up daytime drinking. As a medical professional, Cottle couldn't condone it, but as a human being, who was also seeing more than his fair share of forms and surveys and depositions…

Well. Cottle would be lying if he said he didn't understand the impulse.

Then the government had stepped in, and made everything worse; why spend a few thousand dollars fixing up a decrepit old base, after all, when you could pour millions of dollars into turning it into a museum?

So the bureaucrats had streamed in, and taken measurements, and held press conferences, and required a seemingly endless series of directions to get them from point A to point B.

By the time they'd set the date for the decommissioning ceremony, Cottle wasn't even annoyed anymore; he was just _relieved_. He wasn't sure what he was going to do with the rest of his life—after all, he'd been the doctor at Galactica for over thirty years—but at least he knew this: all this trouble would be behind him.

If only.

So they'd been busy, signing documents, and welcoming dignitaries, and generally being accommodating to a whole host of people who had no business being on a military base in the first place. It had kept them busy, anyway; too busy to think about what they would do when it was all over…too busy to realize what was really going on.

Everyone on earth had been busy, Cottle figured. That was how nobody realized the danger they were in…until it was too late.

The first reports were vague, of course.

Viral infection, seen in isolated pockets of the globe. Not that Cottle saw those reports, of course. By the time the medical community got wise to what was going on, the reports were far more dire: hospitals overwhelmed, antibiotic- and vaccine-resistant strain, _the general population has no immunity, none at all_…

Nobody had the nerve to use the word 'zombie' until after it was too late, when the communication lines had been cut off altogether.

Not that Cottle knew any of this at the time. No, at the time, he was busy seeing patients, and handing out aspirin and ace bandages, and counting down the days until his retirement.

The day of the decommissioning began the way all of Cottle's days did: wake up, light a cigarette, stumble around with a cup, or two, or three, of bad coffee.

He hadn't known it would be the end of the world, after all.

He saw a few last patients—mostly for such pressing complaints as hangnails and hangovers—and he watched the last, most important batch of bureaucrats make an appearance: apparently, someone had decided that the decommissioning of an Air Force base required the esteemed presence of the Secretary of Education, of all people.

Cottle wouldn't see her until after the ceremony—few crew members would, apart from those required to pose with her in the last official photos taken at Galactica—but he heard the announcement—_Galactica is honored to welcome Secretary Laura Roslin, who will be participating in today's events_—and winced.

He figured his old friend, Galactica's commander, Bill Adama, was right: nothing was worse than a bunch of politicians running amok, _trying to help_.

Cottle smoked a few more cigarettes and tried to look on the bright side: he might be out of a job, but at least he wouldn't have to have anything to do with _those people_.

How very deeply wrong he'd be.

By the time the decommissioning ceremony rolled around, Cottle had moved on from annoyance, to irritation, to a last, embarrassing wave of nostalgia…to something near acceptance, or at least a very strong desire for the whole thing to be over.

By that time, half the governments on earth were shutting down.

Not that Cottle knew that, of course. If he had…well, he wasn't sure what he would have done differently. Maybe nothing. Maybe it wouldn't have made any difference at all.

But at the very least, he would have had a chance to stock up on better food rations. Six months down the line, when Galactica had long ago run out of the good stuff, and soldiers and civilians alike were existing on a diet of freeze-dried soy derivatives, "better food rations" would be the stuff of fantasy.

But live and learn, Cottle figured. They'd been lucky, after all. As a military base, Galactica was self-sufficient, closed off from outsiders, but as a designated "non-combat approved," it had been spared the fate of the higher-grade military assets, lost in the first wave of the disaster…with their fancy equipment, and their commando teams, and their fully-loaded arsenals...and their barbed-wire fences torn down, their supplies ransacked, their directors and major generals felled by an illness no one could name, no one could stop.

Outside, schools were closing down, highways were clogging up, and government buildings were being overrun.

Inside, the ceremony went on as planned. Cottle wasn't in attendance—as a doctor, he was exempt from these kind of events, for which he was profoundly grateful—but from what he was told later, nothing out of the ordinary occurred. Secretary Laura Roslin gave the expected speech, Bill gave the slightly less expected speech, and the whole thing was over in time for a nice lunch. It was exactly what a decommissioning ceremony should be.

Except that outside, civilization had ground to a halt.

Cottle had never given much thought to what the end of the world would look like. But if he had, he would have guessed something dramatic, something _violent_; not slow, agonizing death by disease.

And he definitely wouldn't have guessed that the dead would rise up again and wreak havoc on the living.

No one had. That was the problem.

The first victim was one of the reporters, sent to cover the decommissioning. At first, the symptoms were nothing out of the ordinary: low-grade fever, muscle aches, general fatigue.

Which was why Aaron Doral didn't think to seek medical attention until it was too late.

By the time Doral's body was discovered, it wasn't only his body any longer; it was a shuffling, moaning, gnawing weapon of a corpse. Two Marines were killed trying to take it out.

The third was bitten.

Cottle had seen his fair share of unpleasant injuries, of course. But there was something about the teeth marks in the Marine's flesh, the dark red marks streaking from it, that sent a shiver of dread down his spine, even as he was bandaging the wound.

The Marine would die, of course. But not before most of human civilization fell, too.

When the Marine—Sadie Duncan was her name, he would never forget that, not the first patient he lost to this thing—continued to worsen, her fever spiking, delirium setting in, Cottle lit a cigarette, and told himself it was just bad luck, that human bites were always bad news.

When she died, he lit another cigarette, and went over her chart, over and over again.

Thirty-eight minutes later, when Sadie Duncan rose up again, batting away at the white sheet covering her face, and sank her teeth into a nurse, Cottle knew he'd been right to be alarmed.

When it took two of her former fellow Marines to subdue her—when warnings didn't faze her, when gunshots didn't fell her, when only a bullet in her brainstem succeeded in turning her back into the corpse she should have been to begin with, Cottle knew it, deep in his bones: they were screwed.

That was when he turned on the radio.

They were already receiving the signals up in CIC. He didn't know it then, but Bill and Saul, along with their senior staff, were listening to the broadcasts, their hands over their mouths and horror in their eyes.

_One bite is all it takes. Within twenty-four hours, they're dead…and then they're not. They rise up again, all of them, every single one…_

_But they don't come back as people. They open their eyes, and they stagger up, and they sink their teeth into the first living human they can find, rip the flesh straight off their bones…_

If Cottle hadn't seen it, he wouldn't have believed it, would have thought it was a hoax, a mistake, mass paranoia, maybe.

But Cottle had seen it.

_They don't think. They don't speak. They don't hesitate. They hunger, and they feed, over and over and over again…_

_Bullets don't stop them, fire doesn't stop them…cut off every one of their limbs, and they'll slither…They just keep coming, and coming, and coming…_

At first, the news reported that hundreds had been affected, then thousands, then millions.

The numbers kept rising.

_We don't know how the virus was released into the population. We don't know how it works. All our antivirals and antibiotics have failed. The virus is still spreading._

Radio broadcasts ground to a halt. Emergency transmissions ceased.

One last message from the CDC got through, the voice panicked, the transmission crackly with static: _There are twelve carriers. We don't know who they are._

Then the frequency went dead.

That's when Cottle went to the morgue, to have another look at Doral's body.

Galactica had been closed down to outsiders since before the outbreak began, and there were no other reports of infection on the base.

Cottle could only conclude that he must have been bitten, infected, before he came onto the base.

Except there were no bite marks on Doral's body.

Rumors ran rampant. Bill had closed the doors against outsiders; disease carriers were lurking inside the walls; the Secretary of Education had been sworn in as President.

Cottle kept smoking.

They were alone. They had limited supplies. The undead were piling up against the walls, throwing themselves against the walls. It was only a matter of time until inevitability won out, and they were all dead…or worse.

But Cottle tried to look on the bright side.

At least he wasn't out of cigarettes…_yet._


End file.
